


Devil's advocate

by ElephantLoveMedley



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: College, F/M, First Meetings, debate class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 19:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19026781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElephantLoveMedley/pseuds/ElephantLoveMedley
Summary: He walked the line of his lives with perfect balance, he kept his lies well organized and planned. Everyone had secrets and everything could be a distraction. He didn't want the last one. He swore to himself he would never cross that lines, not for anyone.He was himself and nothing more. Nothing less.OR Aaron Minyard is full of rage and fighting with strangers is the only copying mechanism he knows. Enter Katelyn.





	Devil's advocate

Aaron Minyard was a creature of habit. Habit and silence. He liked peace, quiet and infinite time to think, read or learn. He wasn't afraid of being alone with his thoughts, he knew he was full of bullshit, and most of the time he was able to catch himself before the fall. When he couldn't he resolved to alcohol, but he knew to keep away from drugs. He wouldn't go there anymore.  
He was constantly treading a precipice. His life carefully styled in hermetic compartments: nothing in and nothing out. He was the only conjunction among the different activities and people in it. He wasn't even sure he could call his life a life: “lives” sounded better. He was always the same person, but his life on the court and his life in the lab weren't the same. His present wasn't his past and he sure as hell hoped that his future would turn out a completely different thing than the shame he was living right now.  
He worked. Hard. Harder than anyone could say, but he didn't show it. These things shouldn't matter to the outsiders. This was his, his ideas were his own and he didn't want the stupidity or the eagerness of his family to taint his goals. He believed in one thing and he wanted to keep it beautiful, untouched, unchanged till it came to reality. Then he would adapt himself to live in it. He never thought he could create beauty, but he might as well try and preserve it.  
He walked the line of his lives with perfect balance, he kept his lies well organized and planned. Everyone had secrets and everything could be a distraction. He didn't want the last one. He swore to himself he would never cross that lines, not for anyone.  
He was himself and nothing more. Nothing less.  
He was three layers of carelessness, indifference and anger carefully stacked on each other. Anger was the last one, but it usually managed to seep through the cracks in his core and ruin his intentions. There was a reason why he chose to play defense and there was a reason why his elective was debate class.  
The first allowed him to get into a physical fight, he wasn't scared of the bruises, he even liked the pain sometimes, the reminder that he was alive and kicking. Literally kicking.  
The second allowed him to fight with his voice, his arguments.  
He was good at both of them. He didn't always win, but he didn't care, as long as he got to lash out for a few minutes. Sometimes he liked to lose, he had always felt like a bit of a loser. At nothing in particular, but at life in general.  
He had gone through a lot and he had always come out of the difficult situations that life threw at him, but he had never won. He had a participation prize in the game that was life, while everyone else had a gold medal. But he liked it that way.  
He had never lied to himself, he had never believed people when they told him it would get better. It wouldn't. He would keep struggling, maybe not for the same reasons, but he knew he would never be allowed to stop. Slow down, yes, he could do that, but he had to be ready to stand back up and work harder than ever. He was fine with it, as he liked the ache in his bones and the pull in his muscles after a good session at the gym, he liked to keep his brain working. It didn't matter if it was for a good reason or a bad one, he just liked the game.  
That's why he decided to play devil's advocate at every debate class.  
He had always had strange relationships with his teachers, there were mostly two kind of reaction to his bored and difficult attitude: the first kind tended to let him be, let him speak and stop him when it got too much and, however little they liked him, they couldn't deny that he was brilliant, that, however stupid his arguments were, they were wonderfully crafted and masterfully organized. He was fine with this kind of teachers: he didn't have to interact and pretend they liked each other, he only had to go to class and get a mark. Simple as that, a transaction. Nothing more, nothing less.  
He hated the second kind. The second kind was the one that stopped you on your first day and asked you if you needed help, if you wanted them to talk to your parents. “No, thanks, I don't have a father and my mother died in a car crash.” “I'm sorry.” “Don't be.” He smiled. He never smiled, but when he was in front of pathetic people he felt compelled to do so, to fight their pitying eyes with the fakest smile he could muster. Not like he could smile any differently, not that he ever tried.  
The second kind of teachers were the one that didn't accept your rage, they tried to fight it. They tried to be your friend (you never asked for one), they tried to be a parent figure (never needed one), they tried to be close and “I'll always be there for you. When you need me.” - and how weird could they get? Adult people trying to befriend students out of some kind of strange guilt. No, thanks, he was not here for this. It crept him out.  
So he would have dropped out of that class a long time ago, if it wasn't for the tall girl at the back of the class that always put up with him and his arguments. They were always there, back to the wall: Aaron on the left, near the wall and facing the door, and the girl on the right, with her hood covering her hair and a pencil twirling through her fingers, looking out at the window. Bored. They looked both extremely bored.  
They never looked at each other, till a fight started. Even then the girl tended to look ahead, at the class, at the teacher, at her hands. Aaron didn't know her name, but he hated her.  
He hated her because, while he tended to play devil's advocate, she always tried to stand on morally high ground. He played for the devil and she played for justice, but both of them tended to reach extremes: two morally grey people trying to fight on the absolutes of black and white matters. Neither could win, neither could loose. They both liked the game. And they were both damn good at it.  
Aaron hated the way she used her words, the way she twisted his arguments to get a point across, he hated how most of the time she was right. He hated how she usually chose the right side, the one backed up by common sense and common decency. He hated how she seated slumped on her chair, watching the rain fall to the ground, and straightened her back only when she found an argument of her likes. He hated the mirth in her eyes for the few seconds when she realized that he was the one replying to her absurd thesis. He hated her bored gaze for the rest of the class. But, most of all, he hated her smile when she managed to leave him without ammunition. Speechless in front of the class. He hated it, because it was the smile she had when he managed to do the same. Leave her there, stranded and with no refuge.  
He hated her, but he loved, loved, loved the look of exasperation on his teacher's face, the expressions of relief of his classmates when a fight died down. He felt like he wasn't alone ruling over chaos. He finally had someone that helped him hold the reins. It was a non-spoken agreement. A transaction, and he liked it that way.  
He had managed to go a whole year like this, feeling like he had someone on his side. Someone not completely against him. He had managed to go a year and learn only the girl's name: Katelyn, what a clichè, he hoped she hated her name. He had managed to go a year and feel like he had a companion, someone to share the chaos with, to divide the burden. He had managed to go a year and a week into his second year at Palmetto when everything changed.  
He had sit at the back of the class, on the left, waiting for Katelyn to arrive and sit on the right: two rows, like in some sort of fucked up chess play.  
She arrived and he was dressed in black; she moved first.  
The topic was climate changes: boring and overused, but it was only the second week of class, so they made do. Katelyn decided to defend questionable positions, leaving him on the right side, the morally high one, the just one. He wasn't comfortable with it, but he wasn't going to lose. And even if he didn't find it fun to debate a common and right position, Katelyn's arguments made him work hard to keep things real.  
As always, they managed to reach extremes, to fight on black and white ground, to dismantle the philosophy of nihilism in a single session of debate. It was not even about climate changes anymore, it was about winning.  
Aaron won, it was inevitable given hi position on the fight. Katelyn smiled, that fucking smile that made his blood boil and fists close. She stopped twirling her pencil and uncovered her hair, waiting for the end of the lesson and staring out of the window. Aaron looked at her, but she never met his gaze. It was infuriating.  
At the end of the class, she stood up, walked to Aaron's desk and told him: “I knew you had some good in you.” He only looked at her, they had never spoken, they had never crossed that line and Aaron didn't want his chaos of a life to get messed up. He stared at her. “You know, sometimes it's more difficult to defend the right choice than the wrong one.”  
She left. And he was left alone.


End file.
